


Gazebo

by FrannieHopkirk



Category: Short Stories - Saki
Genre: Prose Poem
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-14
Updated: 2020-08-14
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:40:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25887487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrannieHopkirk/pseuds/FrannieHopkirk
Kudos: 3





	Gazebo

I first came across Jenny Grimm when we were both loading old summer roses into our supermarket trollies - summer stock past the use-by date but still worthy of bringing back to life. “I can’t help myself” she said. “I ’m the same” says me as we continued rummaging and reading with great seriousness, the labels on rubbishy old plants. 

This was virtually the only conversation I ever had with her although in the silences that sometimes nourish relationships between certain individuals, I would play a small role in her life: The important conversation we consequently did have proved vital to her and satisfying to me. She asked me to write the local council on the matter of a building permit for her to build a Gazebo in a garden she had been toiling on for the past four years or so. The problem was, the council had declined her application. 

Desperate and devastated, she turned to me. I am not sure ‘why me’ but I shared her outrage and the result was they stamped her application. At least I assumed so when, the tiny spire of a Gazebo soon appeared above the trees. What I call Jenny Grimm’s ‘Mad Enchantment’ was tied to the building of the Gazebo- the folly she craved to complete her little piece of paradise. A garden made by her.

It all began when she purchased a broken-down, feral, sloping, triangular, paddock better suited to goats than a garden. Her ambition: to create something of order and beauty - from scratch. 

What was understood later was that her garden design had never deviated from the inclusion of a Gazebo. This was to be the stand-alone gesture, the intelligence of her achievement, the ‘hearth’, the soul place of her dream. The potency of her desire was of course, lost to the council, but not to me. It was like a secret. She imagined she could simply build the thing and nobody would know or care. Lawfully appealing to the council unveiled plans better left alone. She had lifted the lid and now she had to close it.

Enchantment begins this way – an unstoppable passion charged by impatience, a fearless energy that WILL have its way. Jenny was in love with the idea of the Gazebo. She understood its significance in the overall design. She was not going to relinquish it even if it killed her. Like Monet’s waterlily pond at Giverny: The symbol of the ‘centre’ it’s significance as an element in all art was something Jenny instinctively understood. Monet, the Impressionist painter who has placed the mystique of garden design at the forefront of civilized human conscience, had placed his waterlillies at the heart of his garden. 

Jenny Grimm was an older woman, a widow, orphaned at eleven. All this, told to me by a relative of hers’, spoke volumes of a life of emotional hardship. I saw clearly the saddness in her life finding solace and recompense through the fantasy, the romantic folly of her project. The little I saw of her indicated a loner, one of those people who are seldom lonely because they know the value of aloneness. Her name was all I really knew of her. 

I could hear her gentle chucklings over the fence as she rounded up her ducks and chooks, the soundless murmur used by those who work with stock or birds, or dogs, the intimate whisperings of nurture. I felt kindred to her despite my own enforced privacy. Very occasionally she would appear at my place, calling for some pioneering fowl that had flown over the fence and found a roosting spot staring into space somewhere in my garden. But no conversation ensued. We liked it that way.

Her dream shattered she turned to me. She thought I had influence, that I could change the course of events, that her ideas would find fulfillment. It was obvious that she was never going to relinquish her plan, even if it killed her. I wrote the council assuring that Jenny Grimm’s Gazebo would not devalue the historic fabric, the town’s aesthetic, but would in fact confirm its charm. In truth her petite building would barely be seen by anyone, so hidden was it among the trees she had planted to serve her need for privacy.

A Gazebo is folly, a fantasy with a long history of indulgence, a voluptuous, timeless idleness. What was Jenny Grimm going to do with her glamorous Gazebo - if she succeeded in building it? Would she read poetry in there, sitting in her cane chair? Would she meditate? Would she drink wine with a friend? Would she enjoy a tryst? Would she eat a meal out there? Would she play music? Would she watch the sunset, admire the garden she had created? Yes to all of these things.

The classic circular space wrapped in its windows stared back at me. The reflected glass bore a strange emptiness, a blindness, a blankness. Was I missing something? Was this what she saw in her quest of a dream? Dreams are personal, no one knows what they really mean. Jenny’s dream was no different. How could I know the rewards she experienced as she sat in that chair. 

Looking through the door the glass seemed to be confiding that it never had a purpose beyond completing a garden design. By now the garden was showing signs of the corruption of time and neglect. Was this was the existential moment when art is done and meaning must be reasoned, understood. The aloneness of completion? The ‘what now?’ pause.

I was not in a relationship with her beyond the problem with the council – she told me nothing, nor thanked me. It didn’t matter. The thing was built. I had seen nothing more of her until someone told me she had died of cancer aged 61.  
The Gazebo stands empty in its skirt of dark hedging, three wooden steps leading to the door is kept locked, the cane chair remains on the dusty floor but the space is empty, a dream had found fruition. Jenny’s task was finished. The garden slowly died and wept around her. 

I still stroll over there with the dogs to steal roses, gaze at the Gazebo and think about the woman who had so richly inhabited this world. Her small cottage stands empty, occasionally someone mows the grass, the white picket gate is always open, I watch the winter sun lick the glass walls as it drops behind the trees, refracted and reflected light behaves just as its architect had planned it. Stemming from fragments of the waning day, these are the moments that bring comprehension and clarity to everything. 

My impulse to visit Jenny Grimm’s garden at this time of day connected us. She was no longer there, yet she had left her spirit behind. She was threaded to my reverie as I had in a small way, wordlessly, been entwined with hers. Dusk was when these threads became cogent. In the silences between us I had understood the importance and significance of the Gazebo and that was sufficient. When all other evidence of her is gone, the little pavilion, so cherished, would remain. I valued that I had played a small part in its realization.

The last of the sun slithered into garden, slipping from shadow to shadow, tree to tree, recreating texture of trunk and bark, finding paths through grass, stacked firewood, a sculpture, searching, like God with a flash-light. It’s progress seemed to be time itself passing. The light found my spot on the wooden steps, then hurried on toward the dark as though looking for something that was no longer there. The deep shadows, the creeping light, the out-of-focus glitter of distant roses, were all magically blended and reflected in the glass walls. The last of the day flowed on through all the spaces until finally leaving the garden to its dark reverie.

There was a poetry here – the distances between the woman who had conceived this and my understanding of it – down to the spot the setting sun would maximize the romantic effect she sought ; the Supermarket forays, the wanton growing of roses, my complicity in persuading the council to issue the building permit she craved – so simple yet so enormously important to her. When she had begun her garden she but six years left of her life. She must have known her time was running out. The urgency had been real.

I went to her funeral thinking about the sounds of her feeding her ducks, and chooks, the roses, the glimpses of her head above the wire fence as she went about her quiet business - Jenny Grimm and I, both Outsiders, both Gardeners. The Gazebo was her dreaming place, a place sacred to her, her pleasure dome, her Kubla Khan.


End file.
